A Study Of The Uncanny In Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has been regarded as one of the most successful novels by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). In this book, Woolf not only vividly presents her characters’fear and anxiety, but also discloses the social factors that cause their anxiety, which shows Woolf’s concern for social system and social problems. Many scholars have investigated Mrs. Dalloway from the perspective of psychoanalysis or social criticism, but few could combine these two perspectives in their analysis and give a feasible explanation for her characters’ negative feelings. This thesis aims to explore the causal relationship between individual psychology and social domination by analyzing how the feeling of something uncanny is aroused and what external factors give rise to this feeling.Woolf presents the psychological effects of the uncanny through the description of her characters’negative feelings. Different from other types of fear, this category of horror is aroused when the characters’repressed memories and emotions return and fall into their consciousness or when something both familiar and unfamiliar to these characters appears. What the characters choose to suppress are usually ideas or emotions that are not tolerated by their society. When these repressed ideas and emotions reoccur in memories, dreams and so on, the characters’dread and anxiety will be stirred up.Under the domination of different societal forces, the characters are trapped in different predicaments. Septimus is frequently attacked by his hallucination of the dead Evan because Septimus has suppressed his grief or anguish, and that strong feeling is not advocated by his society. Clarissa is often threatened by her tendency to commit suicide because she has been deprived of her independence by the male-dominated society and been forced to repress her independent and creative individuality. Miss Kilman can not keep her rage in check because her gender and class determine her fate and she can not control her own life even with the help of religion. Lucrezia is frequently shrouded by her sense of hopelessness because the society impedes her true communication with other people including her husband.However, these characters are not willing to be dominated by the ruling class in their society. Instead, they try to reconstruct their identities by establishing connections with other people, to uphold truth by challenging the authority and to seek spiritual comfort by the practice of universal love. As a social critic, Woolf expresses in Mrs. Dalloway her criticism of domination and violence in any form. Mrs. Dalloway seems to narrate the uncanny experiences of individual characters, yet in fact, it discloses the nature of imperialism, hierarchy, science and religion. They are nothing but the tools the ruling class use to achieve their domination.